Michigan State University’s History Of The Modern Comic Book #3 By Professor Ethan Watrall – Comics, In the Beginning: From Prehistory to Golden Age

I’d like to welcome everyone back to The History of the Modern Comic Book – a column that (roughly) parallels my class (of the same name) which I’m teaching in the Department of History at Michigan State University.

Last time, we explored some basic questions that lay the foundation for a look at the history of comic books – namely why we should care about comics (from the perspective of a university class). This time around, we’re actually going to start our crazy jaunt though the history of comics. As is customary, I’m going to peel off an interesting topic or two from my overall lecture to explore in this column. To start off with, I’m going to explore the very beginnings of the medium – where all of this crazy stuff began. From there, I’m going to take a look look at the two types of publications without which comic books would never have existed: comic strips and adventure pulps. I’m going to finish off with a look at the beginnings of the comic book industry itself.

In the Beginning

As any good history goes, it’s good to start at the beginning. For comic books, that beginning is in 1827 (or 1837 depending on your perspective – more on that later) in Switzerland with a guy named Rodolphe Töpffer. Now, old Rodolphe had a bit of a family history in the arts. His dad, Adam-Wolfgang Töpffer, served as “Drawing Master” from 1804 to 1807 to Joséphine, Empress-consort of the First French Empire (a fairly big deal). Given this, its no great surprise that Rodolphe wanted to be an artist – specifically a painter. Unfortunately, he couldn’t quite hack it. So, instead, he became a teacher – and eventually ran his own boarding school. Throughout all of this, he wrote a series of literary analyses and literary studies – specifically a translation of Demosthenes in 1824 and a study of the Iliad in 1831 (if you were burning to know). It was based on this literary scholarship that he was appointed as chair of Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres at the University of Geneva. Even though Rodolphe never became a professional “artist,” he never stopped drawing & painting. Of particular interest to us a little “doodle” he did called Histoire de M. Vieux Bois. Created in 1827 (but published in 1837), Histoire de M. Vieux Bois was a 30 page illustrated story recounting the crazy trials and tribulations of the titular character (Vieux Bois) in life (and mainly love). Each page of the story had between one and six illustrated panels & associated captions (word balloons don’t come around until later). Histoire de M. Vieux Bois had many important hallmarks of a modern comic book:

* Encapsulation - choosing certain moments of prime action from the imagined story and encapsulating, or enclosing, renderings of those moments in a discrete space.

* Sequentiality – depiction of a sequence of actions or change over time

* Visual Literacy – storytelling that requires both the words and pictures in order to make sense.

In 1842, Histoire de M. Vieux Bois was re-published in the United States as a (wildly successful) newspaper supplement titled The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck. In total, Rodolphe Töpffer went on to publish 6 of these little illustrated stories – each with a different set of characters and scenarios. They all had the same unique, very comic book-like storytelling conventions. However, Rodolphe’s new way of telling stories wouldn’t really start gaining steam until a little bit later. To get there, we need to look at the two types of publications that made the comic book industry possible: comic strips and adventure pulps.

The Foundations of the Modern Comic Book: Comic Strips & Adventure Pulps

The modern comic book industry (and I’m talking the industry here, not the medium) didn’t spring magically from the ground fully formed – it grew out of two somewhat related publishing industries: comic strips and adventure pulp magazines.

Newspaper comic strips got their start just before the turn of the 19th century. One of the most famous (and influential) of these early comic strips got its start in 1894. Written by Richard Felton Outcault, the strip was a weekly cartoon about a group of mischievous New York City kids from the wrong side of the tracks. The strip, which was published in the Sunday World newspaper, was eventually titled Hogan’s Alley. As the strip evolved two things happened. First, it started focusing almost exclusively on one character – Mickey Dugan, who was more commonly known as the Yellow Kid (because he was always wearing a yellow nightshirt). The second thing is that the strip evolved from a single illustration to a multi-panel narrative. The Yellow Kid became so popular that he became the focus of a little merchandising empire. His likeness appeared on all sorts of crazy things – billboards, buttons, cigarette packs, cigars, cracker tins, ladies’ fans, matchbooks, postcards, chewing gum cards, toys, and whiskey.

Now, The Yellow Kid certainly wasn’t the only newspaper comic strip out there – not by a long shot. Every newspaper had a strip (or strips) of their own. Buster Brown, The Katzenjammer Kids, Mutt And Jeff, and (my favorite) Foxy Grandpa were all popular titles of the day. The whole point is that publishers figured out really quickly that comic strips sold newspapers.

Now, what’s really important about the Yellow Kid (beyond its popularity, of course) is that it was the first strip to be repackaged and republished in its own book – The Yellow Kid Magazine. It didn’t actually contain any original material – just reprints of the strips that had already run in the newspaper. But in the grand scheme of things, this really didn’t matter that much. What mattered was that the publisher recognized that strips could be reprinted in their own book, and that people would buy that book. Up until now, all “comics” were published in newspapers. However, when you collect and reprint them as their own publication, you are getting a lot closer to the modern idea of a comic book.

The second part of the equation are pulp adventure magazines. At the beginning of the 20th century, pulp magazines were beginning to replace dime novels as a form of cheap entertainment for the middle class and educated lower class. As a quick side note, “pulp” in pulp magazine comes from the fact that they were published on super low quality wood pulp paper. Now, at the very beginning of the 20th century, Adventure pulp magazines generally had stories featuring the likes of Zoro and Tarzan. However, in the late 1920s and 1930s, pulp magazines started to be dominated less by “classic” adventure stories and characters (the Tarzans and the Zorros) and more by science fiction and hero archetypes (like Doc Savage, The Shadow, and Captain Future: Wizard of Science.)

So, what is the punch-line? How did the comic strip and adventure pulp industry create a foundation for the comic book industry? Well, the simple answer is that the format and commercial infrastructure of comic books grew primarily out of a repackaging of comic strips (in book form). On the other hand, part of the investment capital, much of the writing (and editorial) talent, and many of the hero archetypes (that dominate the beginning of the Golden Age) came from pulp adventure magazines.

The (True) Beginnings of the Comic Book Industry

Up until this point we’ve been talking about the “foundations” of the comic book industry or “influences” on the comic book industry. Now its time kick down the door, and actually look at the beginning of the comic book industry. The year is 1929, the place is…well…I don’t really know the place, but that doesn’t really matter. The company is Dell Publishing, a fairly run of the mill publisher at the time – they published magazines, pulp adventure magazines, and books. Dell changes the game in 1929 when they teamed up with Eastern Color Printing (a printing company) to publish The Funnies (cue dramatic music). The Funnies was a 16 page tabloid-format collection of comic strips that came out regularly on Saturdays. It’s cover price was 10¢ (later reduced to 5¢). Here is the thing, The Funnies looked almost like every other comic strip magazine at the time. The one difference? Original content. Thats right, The Funnies didn’t reprint strips that had previously been published in newspapers. Instead, it featured completely new content. This is a huge deal. It puts us on the road to comic books being a venue for original stories, as opposed to just a way to squeeze more money out of something thats already been published somewhere else. Unfortunately, The Funnies only lasted a whopping 36 issues. However, the book laid down the groundwork for other, more successful comics – such as Eastern Color Printing’s Funnies on Parade (1933), and the 1934 Eastern Color Printing/Dell Publishing Famous Funnies: A Carnival of Comics – all of which had original content. From here, Its only hop, skip, and a jump to 1938 (cue the dramatic music again) when the Golden Age explodes onto the scene with the release of Action Comics #1.

At this point in our story, I’m going to sign off. We’ve run (a little helter skelter) from the beginnings of the medium until the beginnings of the industry, covering a hell of a lot of ground in between. Before I leave you until next time, however, I want to throw out a discussion question (I am a professor, what do you expect?) So, here it is – comic strip and comic books look a lot alike. But what are the differences? Is there really a difference?

For those who’ve got a hankering to see what other topics I covered in this lecture (there was more than just what I talked about in this column), I’ve made all of my lecture slides available for download on the course website. I’ve also recorded the entire lecture and stuck the audio up on the course website as well (something which I’ll be doing for all of the lectures). All of this can be found in the Resources section of the course website. On tap for next week’s column: The Innocent, Seduced: From Golden to Silver. We’ll be looking at the emergence of the Golden Age, Dr. Fredric Wertham and the Comics Code Authority, and the birth of the Silver Age. Fun stuff.

In the meantime, check out the course website – and read what the students are writing about their weekly books. You can also follow me on Twitter where I’ll be tweeting updates on the class (as well as my other classes and my exciting life as an academic…fun times).

Assistant Professor Ethan Watrall
Michigan State University

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